Jane Weaver: Love In Constant Spectacle

(Fire)

LP | CD | DL

Released April 5th

Amy Britton listens to Love In Constant Spectacle, the new album from Jane Weaver, and finds a cosmic odyssey of a record unafraid to be bold and expansive.

Back when I interviewed Jane Weaver for Louder Than War about her album Flock, released during the Covid pandemic, she told me that she felt there was “a strong collective energy” amongst musicians that would hopefully produce something positive on the other side. In the case of her own new album, Love In Constant Spectacle, the evidence is there that this is very much the case for her. With John Parish on production duties (his first collaboration with Weaver), the two seem almost tailor-made to work with each other. The other positive is perhaps that the pandemic had helped tear up the previous era of the stunted musical attention span and helped usher in album “deep dives” and appreciation, bringing back a new era for “album artists” – which, as Love in Constant Spectacle confirms, Weaver very much is.

The scene is set with opener Perfect Storm, a hypnotic pendulum swing of a record overlaid with Broadcast-esque vocals. With the album’s huge but delicate themes of fragility and mortality appearing fugue-like throughout, the sounds manage to reflect this in an almost synaesthetic fashion. Songs such as Emotional Components and Motif feel delicate and expansive at the same time, full of spacey, dreamy elements. The former takes this literally peppering its lyrics with the elements; the latter’s lyrics are full of sensual, floral imagery. When sat between these two tracks, the title track and lead single, Love In Constant Spectacle, fits comfortably, as if designed to be part of a triptych.

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The template plays out throughout, but Weaver never plays it too safe in the genre and sound field. Happiness in Proximity and the aforementioned Motif have a looping trip-hop feel, whereas the ethereal landscape is cut into with midpoint track Is Metal, which has a significantly chunkier sound. “My mind is electricity, my mind is metal,” Weaver sings, blending herself into the elemental world.

The album closes with a trio of tracks which continue the feel of a musical flotation through the space – Romantic Worlds, Universe, and Family of The Sun. The latter is an odyssey with echoes of Nico at her most reflective, its images of ghosts and escaping loneliness making it the most perfectly expansive end to the album.

While Weaver is frequently described as a “psychedelic,” artist, this is not psychedelia as we know it – expansive and oft-experimental, but less spectrum of mind-melting colour, more velvet blacks and shimmering silvers. The result is a hypnotic musical floatation tank revealing an artist truly creating her most fulfilled, ambitious and well-realised work yet.

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Jane Weaver 2024 live dates
18 Apr: Brudenell Social Club, Leeds, UK
19 Apr: Trinity Centre, Bristol, UK
20 Apr: Arts Club, Liverpool, UK
21 Apr: Castle & Falcon, Birmingham, UK
23 Apr: Oran Mor, Glasgow, UK
24 Apr: The Glasshouse, Gateshead, UK
26 Apr: Band on the Wall, Manchester, UK
28 Apr: Rescue Rooms, Nottingham, UK
29 Apr: Junction, Cambridge, UK
30 Apr: Wedgewood Rooms, Portsmouth, UK
01 May: Concorde 2, Brighton, UK
02 May: Scala, London, UK
09 May: Whelan’s, Dublin, Ireland
10 May: Róisín Dubh, Galway, Ireland
11 May: Dolans, Limerick, Ireland
12 May: Ulster Sports Bar, Belfast, UK
23 May: Bearded Theory, Catton Hill, Derbyshire, UK
All tickets available here.

Jane Weaver is online, and on Facebook.

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All words by Amy Britton. Find more on her archive here.

• Source: https://louderthanwar.com/jane-weaver-love-in-constant-spectacle/